MATTHEW ENGELKE

London School of Economics

Religion and the media turn:

A review essay

Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Birgit Meyer and All three volumes under review here are noteworthy
Annelies Moors, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, contributions to the media turn. Birgit Meyer and Annelies
2006. vii + 325 pp., illustrations, index. Moors’s Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere focuses at-
tention on two of the most well-developed arguments to
Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture. David Morgan,
emerge thus far: first, that the version of secular moder-
ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. xv + 240 pp.
nity in which religion is considered private is untenable;
Religion: Beyond a Concept. Hent de Vries, ed. New and, second, that mass media and religion are not, con-
York: Fordham University Press, 2008. xiv + 1006 pp., comitantly, irreconcilable. Religion, in other words, is pub-
illustrations. lic, and religions have not been killed by television. Hent
de Vries’s tome (that is the best word), Religion: Beyond a
A B S T R A C T Concept, reminds readers that, among other things, using
In this review essay, I consider three recent collections, one edited such terms as religion and religions without scare quotes
by anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by a and caveats, as I have just done, is either very naive or very
philosopher, that reflect on what might be called “the media turn” in brave. His particular insight—shared by several other au-
religious studies. I situate these collections in relation to broader thors in his collection and made possible by this idea of
trends and interests within anthropology, religious studies, and religion as mediation—is that it is perhaps both naive and
media studies, focusing in particular on the idea of religion as brave. David Morgan’s Key Words in Religion, Media, and
mediation, which involves, in part, a turn away from conceptions of Culture is evidence of an arrival of sorts, an indication of
belief and toward materiality and practice. [religion, media, just how important it has already become for scholars of re-
materiality, belief, the public sphere] ligion to consider their subject in relation to its media and
their materiality.
he study of religion is undergoing what might be

T
remembered in a generation’s time as “the media
turn.” For one thing, this means that anthropolo- In constellation: The books
gists and others are focusing more than in the past
on the social uses of media within religious life, With apologies to the individual authors—all 70 of them—
even of such old media as printed texts and painted images I am not able here to touch on every chapter in any depth
(if more often radio, video and film, audiocassettes, the In- (there are 74). In the case of de Vries’s collection, this se-
ternet, and other of the newer and newest kinds). This trend lectivity is made somewhat easier to justify by the fact that
is a good thing in itself; more importantly, however, this not all the chapters address the themes of media or medi-
new work has, at its best, started a wholesale engagement ation, although it is worth noting that the batch of essays
with and evaluation of processes of mediation as schol- most explicitly relevant (the eight in part 6: “Materiality,
ars attempt to rethink how we should understand the very Mediatization, Experience”) are not the only ones to do so:
concept of “religion.” Within much of this work, religion Several essays located in other parts of the volume, includ-
is understood as mediation—a set of practices and ideas ing those by José Casanova, Jan Assmann, Charles Taylor,
that cannot be understood without the middle grounds that Veena Das, Régis Debray, Willem B. Drees, Patricia Spyer,
substantiate them. Such a perspective creates some exciting Talal Asad, Michael Warner, and Peter van der Veer address
opportunities, if also a few dangers. mediation in one sense or another (via discussions of the

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 371–379, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425.  C 2010 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01261.x
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 2 May 2010

public sphere, secularism, icons and iconography, political as they have in television (see Rajagopal 2001)—despite the
ideologies, and pedagogy). Even so, it is important to give worries of India’s more secular and critically minded middle
some sense of each book in and of itself, in part because the classes. Reading the collection as a whole drives home not
three are different kinds of books and so not commensu- only the points mentioned above (about religion’s refusal to
rate at every level. It is also useful, I think, to say something go private and the ease with which many religious commu-
about how—although they are quite different—these vol- nities have incorporated new media technologies) but also,
umes connect in a behind-the-scenes way. The media turn in good anthropological fashion, that Jürgen Habermas’s
is not exhaustively represented in these volumes, and yet classic formulation of the public sphere (even as amended
among them they not only include contributions by several to factor in religion; see Habermas 2006) cannot be trans-
of the key scholars to have fostered it but they also provide ported easily outside of the West. “The point here,” write
a glimpse of the social networks and institutional contexts Meyer and Moors in their introduction, “is not to employ
that have helped make it possible. Like other productive the notion of the public sphere as a universal notion but
turns and “moments” in the human sciences, this one is a rather to use it as a starting point in order to develop a more
result, in part, of synergies and serendipities: the right peo- suitable framework for an analysis of the complicated poli-
ple being in the right places and the right times. tics of identity in the information age” (p. 4).
Meyer and Moors’s Religion, Media, and the Public Morgan’s Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture is
Sphere is the most orthodox and typical kind of edited book, orthodox as well, although in a minor tradition—that pio-
in the sense that it is (1) organized around a particular set of neered by Raymond Williams (1976) of unpacking impor-
themes; (2) framed by a theoretically engaged introduction tant terms. As Morgan ruefully notes, however, whereas
that situates the chapters in relation to existing literatures; Williams was himself able to cover all the key words he
and (3) filled in with a set of empirically grounded case stud- selected for consideration, his own collection is a col-
ies. Not all of the contributors are anthropologists—the ed- laborative effort, bringing together 16 scholars in art his-
itors stress the merits of interdisciplinarity (p. 19)—and yet tory, the history of religions, religious studies, anthropol-
this is the most anthropological of the collections overall. ogy, sociology, literature, theology, journalism, and media
It is also the collection most obviously focused on media studies. The list of 15 key words chosen for comment “cap-
in the mass-media sense: The authors look at film, tele- tures much of the energy and focus” of recent interdis-
vision, video and cassette cultures, and the like. Building ciplinary work, according to Morgan (p. 14), although no
on the core points I note above, the authors here explore claims are made about the list being exhaustive or defini-
three main issues in relation to the public sphere. In part tive. His introduction is very good at charting the emer-
1, Charles Hirschkind, Patricia Birman, Jeremy Stolow, and gence of this work (much of it, even outside the anthropo-
David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner examine how differ- logical constituency, indebted to Clifford Geertz and Victor
ent media technologies (old and new) can give shape to dis- Turner). The introduction also includes Morgan’s encapsu-
tinct kinds of publics. In Egypt, for example, as Hirschkind lation of how to understand the work on religion as media-
shows here, complementing the analyses in his well-known tion, which “has not defined religion as a discrete and uni-
monograph (Hirschkind 2006), the development of an Is- versal essence but has regarded religion as fundamentally
lamic counterpublic via cassette dawa (sermons meant to mediated, as a form of mediation that does not isolate be-
inspire greater piety) is made possible by both the material lief but examines its articulation within . . . social processes”
and sensual properties of the medium (cassettes are small, (p. 8). It is with such regard in mind that Morgan has gath-
easily reproduced, and easily circulated; sound is permeat- ered essays by Meyer and Jojada Verrips on “aesthetics,”
ing and plays mischief with the distinctions that a secular Stewart M. Hoover on “audiences,” Johanna Sumiala on
state wants to make between public and private spaces). “circulation,” J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu on “community,”
In part 2, Moors, Dorothea E. Schulz, Spyer, Rosalind I. J. Angela Zito on “culture,” David Chidester on “economy,”
Hackett, and Faye Ginsburg hone in on “public religion and himself (Morgan’s own chapter) on “image,” Peter Hors-
the politics of difference.” Hackett’s chapter, for instance, field on “media,” Jolyon Mitchell on “narrative,” Pamela
explains how minority religious groups in postapartheid E. Klassen on “practice,” Joyce Smith on “public,” Sarah
South Africa have made claims to state-sponsored televi- M. Pike on “religion,” Schultz on “soundscape,” Stolow on
sion time in the effort to ensure political survival and to “technology,” and Isabel Hofmeyr on “text.” The authors
control their public images. Part 3, with essays by Walter tackle their charges in a variety of ways: Some work from
Armbrust, Ayşe Öncü, Sudeep Dasgupta, Rachel Dwyer, and their own research material (or that of others) to illuminate
Meyer shift the focus to how religious communities have general issues; some provide more theoretical overviews of
circulated and supported images of themselves through concepts driven by the chronologies and concerns of intel-
popular culture and entertainment industries. According to lectual history. All of the chapters are clearly written and
Dwyer, Hindu nationalists have actually not been able to suitable for students; teachers and other professionals will
shape the political meanings of religious identity in film— find most of them engaging too.

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De Vries’s Religion: Beyond a Concept is not orthodox stance, Masuzawa’s, have been published elsewhere, mak-
in any way, shape, or form. Certainly not shape or form: At ing compendium a reasonable word to describe it. What is
over 1,000 pages and also larger than average dimensions more, although de Vries’s chapter is called “Introduction,”
(7 1/8 by 9 1/4 inches), it is the kind of book that has to be at 110 pages (including the 319 endnotes) and no mention
given a space on your desk and only moved off when you are of or framing of the chapters that follow (what little he does
sure you will not need to pull it down from the shelf again say about them is kept to the preface), it is perhaps bet-
any time soon, lest it slip from your hands and cause injury ter seen as a prolegomenon to any future “future of the re-
(an interesting comment, perhaps, on the materiality of re- ligious past” (see below). De Vries’s chapter and his other
ligion). This book is a big deal, an event in object form. In- work in the philosophy of religion (especially de Vries 2001)
deed, you almost feel as if, when you first open it, trumpets are worthy of a review essay in themselves, although here
should blare. Fordham University Press has certainly spared I can do no more than acknowledge that fact and high-
no expense in its production (much to its credit), so you al- light the extent to which his work has set the terms for un-
most feel cheated by the silence, as if a soundtrack really derstanding mediation in the current turn (but see Stolow
should have been included. If I am being somewhat flip- 2005).
pant, it is only to underscore the importance of this book Turning now briefly to scene setting for this trio of vol-
as a physical object in and of itself. umes, I can say with no exaggeration that the media turn
It is not so easy to be flippant about the contents. A would be much less interesting were it not for the generos-
handful of the 43 essays will be widely influential, and part ity of the Dutch state. De Vries’s collection is the first of
6, to which I refer above, is, in de Vries’s own words (and per- five scheduled books based on an international research
haps to the chagrin of the contributors to other parts), “an program called “The Future of the Religious Past,” funded
especially rich set of essays” (p. xiv). The importance of ma- by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
teriality for understanding the idea of mediation is driven (NWO). In addition to the books, this program is sponsoring
home in the first chapter of part 6 (reprinted from Compar- 13 research projects and yearly conferences, which began in
ative Studies in Society and History), by Tomoko Masuzawa, 2002 and will continue through 2011 (and some papers from
on fetishism, which ends with a compelling discussion which are or will be included in the publications). Meyer
about the necessary and nonfigurative link between Victo- and Moors’s edited volume is also the result of a conference
rian understandings of the African primitive and “the every- sponsored in part by the NWO, along with the Amsterdam
day mystery of modern economy” (p. 667). This chapter is School for Social Science Research and (the erstwhile, but
followed by a pair of essays (the first by Stolow, the second formerly Leiden-based) International Institute for the Study
by Stef Aupers, Dick Houtman, and Peter Pels) on the re- of Islam in the Modern World. De Vries, Meyer, and Moors
lationships between religion and technology, one of which all hold chairs in universities in Amsterdam, and several of
(Stolow’s) pushes for a definition of religion as something the contributors to the volumes under review either hold
within “the indeterminate spaces of exchange between hu- positions in the Netherlands, used to hold positions in the
mans and their machines” (p. 686). Next comes Meyer’s al- Netherlands, or have spent time in the Netherlands as visit-
ready influential 2006 inaugural address after joining the ing fellows, researchers, or frequent guests—including Mor-
faculty of the Free University of Amsterdam, in which she gan, who, with Meyer, Horsfield, and Hoover, has been run-
sets out her idea of “religious sensations” and a turn to ning a series of “Media Religion Culture Global Seminars”
aesthetics (see also Meyer 2009). Zito’s analysis of televi- coordinated by Meyer out of the University of Amsterdam
sion and religion in the United States offers reflections on and VU University Amsterdam. Meyer and Morgan are also
“‘mediation’ in the deep theoretical sense of the term” (p. half of the editorial quartet that runs the journal Material
724; more on this below). Niklaus Largier, in a rather dif- Religion (launched in 2005), in which many of the articles
ferent register from the essays already mentioned, offers focus on media and mediation. The ferment is the product
a close reading of Robert Musil’s fiction vis-à-vis his en- of more than these Dutch elements and funding streams, to
gagement with the German mystic Eckhart von Hochheim. be sure, and, when you account for, say, New York Univer-
Extending this focus on the finer arts, Sander van Maas’s sity’s Center for Religion and Media (especially in conjunc-
chapter looks at how a small group of composers in the tion with its advisory board and the university’s anthropol-
1990s stirred controversy by producing new religious art ogy department), along with the Center for Religion, Media,
music (“Holy Minimalism”) much in favor with audiences and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder (es-
but not most critics, and Alena Alexandrova draws atten- pecially in relation to the biennial Conference on Religion,
tion to the “opaque residue” (p. 772) of religious concerns Media, and Culture, which is spearheaded by Hoover, the
(with truth, with iconoclasm) present in so-called secular center’s director), you begin to get a good sense of the par-
art. ticular admixture bubbling away.
In terms of content and form, it is also worth men- Although there is, then, some justification for speak-
tioning that several essays in de Vries’s volume, for in- ing of the media turners (if you will) in terms of collegial

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bonds and intellectual affinities, it is nevertheless impor- manifest the relationship between the known and visible
tant to stress that I am not talking here of a school or an world of humans and the unknown and invisible world of
organized movement; no one is passing out membership spirits and the divine. Reflecting its Latin roots, then, reli-
cards. And neither is the work in these collections repre- gion here refers to both a binding together (religio meaning
sentative of all the work that could be included in this gen- “to bind”) and that which binds: practice and product. In-
eral whatever-it-is label of “the media turn.” A good argu- deed, in much of this work, the points of departure are the
ment could be made, for instance, that Webb Keane’s (2007) material channels through which the binding and manifest-
work on semiotic ideologies, combining insights from fig- ing are understood to take place. To take just a handful of
ures as diverse as C. S. Peirce and Bruno Latour, has also examples from the collections under review, from this per-
been central to focusing scholars’ attention on mediation, spective one might say religion is video (see Meyer in Meyer
certainly within anthropology (see Eisenlohr 2009; Engelke and Moors)—or sometimes not (see Ginsburg in Meyer and
2007; Manning 2008). There are, moreover, parallels be- Moors); or religion is The Pilgrim’s Progress (see Hofmeyr in
tween concerns in European and North American linguis- Morgan); or television (see Zito in de Vries); or cyberspace
tics, stretching back to John Locke, at least, and those with (see Dasgupta in Meyer and Moors); or even electricity (see
mediation here (see Bauman and Briggs 2003). Of the edi- Stolow in de Vries). Materiality, then, is very important in
tors of the collections under consideration, Meyer has cer- and for this new work. One of my favorite indications of this
tainly engaged with Keane’s work, yet for whatever reason, importance is found in Morgan’s earlier, influential study of
the semiotic and linguistic sides of religious issues are not popular religious images, Visual Piety (1998). A trained art
prominent within the volumes. historian, Morgan nevertheless chooses to refer to these im-
ages as, first and foremost, “religious stuff” (1998:xi). This
Religion as mediation says something important.
One benefit of focusing on stuff—be it a mass-
We should no longer reflect exclusively on the mean- produced image of Jesus or a homemade altar to Shiva—is
ing, historically and in the present, of religion—of faith the opportunity it affords for getting beyond that nastiest of
and belief and their supposed opposites such as knowl- religious-studies bugbears: belief (cf. Keane 2009). I men-
edge and technology—but concentrate on the signifi- tion above that Geertz figures prominently in Morgan’s pre-
cance of the processes of mediation and mediatization sentation of the media turn in studies of religion and cul-
without and outside of which no religion would be able ture, and yet the work after this turn—and certainly that
to manifest or reveal itself in the first place. highlighted in the volumes under review here—is not pri-
—Hent de Vries, “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public marily about questions of meaning and belief. Perhaps not
Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Religious surprisingly, it is Karl Marx (and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Studies” Hegel, especially Hegel), rather than Max Weber, who is
good to think with when it comes to mediation. More im-
There is no school, there is no club, but, without doubt, mediately, if not always more explicitly, it is the critiques of
much of the work in the books reviewed here exhibits a religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1963), Jonathan Z. Smith
commitment to something like the goal expressed by de (1998), Talal Asad (1993, 2001), Michael Lambek (2000; see
Vries in the epigraph above. The quote comes from his es- also his essay in de Vries), Derrida (2001), Masuzawa (2005),
say in a collection he coedited with Samuel Weber, Reli- and others that guide the research. Many of these authors
gion and Media (2001), that has served as a touchstone stress how “the materialities of religion are integral to its
for much subsequent work across the range of human sci- constitution” (Asad 2001:206).
ences (see Stolow 2005). That book, in turn, is organized to Practice is a necessary complement to product, as I
a certain extent around the contribution from Jacques Der- have glossed things here. Practice, one might say, produces
rida, appended with the transcript of a conversation center- the product: Religious stuff is not religious until it is made
ing on his essay, in which Derrida speaks of, among other so (at least from a purely analytical standpoint). Here again,
things, the “irreducible bond between religion and media” Marx is particularly relevant, although it is also possible to
(2001:68) and the centrality of the notion of “presence” in trace the influence of more-recent figures (Marshall Sahlins,
the logic of mediation (more about which below). Not all Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau come to mind;
of the contributors to Religion and Media agree with every- of the three, de Certeau garners the most explicit atten-
thing Derrida says (in the conversation transcript, Asad and tion from the contributors to these volumes). Latour (1993,
Julius Lipner challenge him on points, and in his own es- 2002) has also been influential for the ways in which his
say, Michael Fischer does too), yet his ideas set an agenda, work challenges the purity of subject–object distinctions;
certainly for de Vries. in the emerging literature on religion and media, careful
In the work on religion as mediation, “religion” is often attention is given to how mediums can be agentive (thus
understood as the set of practices, objects, and ideas that also harking back to points raised by Marshall McLuhan and

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suggesting a link to Keane’s [2007] interests). Summing up might index something more—and more than the sense of
much of this discussion in her key-word entry for “practice” religion as a social fact. “I would find it shortsighted,” she
in Morgan’s collection—and reinforcing a basic anthropo- writes, “to circumscribe [sensory] regimes and the religious
logical precept—Klassen writes, subjects and communities they create as ‘mere construc-
tions’” (Meyer, in de Vries, p. 718). This is, I think, in line with
In the case of religion and media, the concept of prac- such figures as Latour, whom Meyer goes on to acknowl-
tice has facilitated a shift from focusing purely on the edge; speaking on behalf of the contributors to his coedited
message of a text, image, or sound to considering the volume on the “image wars” in art, science, and religion
medium in its many dimensions: how it works and (Latour and Weibel 2002), Latour declares, “We are dig-
who controls it, to what range of human senses a par-
ging for the origin of an absolute—not relative—distinction
ticular medium appeals, what people do with both
between truth and falsity, between a pure world, abso-
messages and the media that transmit them, and how
ritual, theologies, and religious dispositions are con- lutely emptied of human-made intermediaries and a dis-
stituted and transformed by different kinds of media. gusting world composed of impure but fascinating human-
[p. 138] made mediators” (2002:14). In related ways, the essays by
Droogers, Das, Taylor, and Marion in Religion: Beyond a
One irony of this shift to practice and product is a new Concept refuse certain aspects of the Durkheimian legacy
humility when it comes to the very pronouncements on of the only-social.
which such a shift rests. In the wake of a recognition that There is more on the concept of “religion” and “beyond
religion has no transhistorical, universal essence, there is, the concept” of religion in these volumes, much more. But
in some of this work (not all), a carefully considered uncer- what I have highlighted thus far is indicative of the main di-
tainty about the end of metaphysics per se. When de Vries rections in which discussions head: away from belief and
talks about getting “beyond the concept” of religion, he toward materiality; away from formalism and toward prac-
does not mean getting rid of it, or even some of the mystical tice; away from religion and the secular and toward the
traces it contains. In the following passage, the allusion to postsecular and, in some cases, even back to enchantment
foundations in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s otherwise antifoun- of some kind. At this point, it is worth noting that, by and
dationalist philosophy of language serves as a backstop for large, one discussion that does not take place in these vol-
de Vries, but elsewhere he turns to such different figures as, umes is how institutions figure. It is not that questions of
again, Derrida (who once said, “I rightly pass for an atheist”) structure and authority are sidelined; far from it, and in the
and Alain Badiou (see de Vries, pp. 18–27; Badiou being the Meyer and Moors volume, they are actually key. But there
philosopher du jour who is an atheist but has no time for is something in the way mediums and mediation are ap-
the likes of Derrida, holding as firmly to an idea of Truth as proached (perhaps because of the extent to which belief is
did Plato): seen as the problematic term) that does not lead to much
discussion of institutional power, or, even more precisely,
The study of “religion” and whatever may yet come to “the link between institutional power and interpretive prac-
take its place depends upon a rigorous alternation be- tice” (Rutherford 2006:106).
tween the “universal” and “essential” (to be defined) Having touched on “religion,” what remains is to ex-
and the “singular” or exemplary “instant,” “instance,” plain how mediation itself functions in the turn. This is a
and “instantiation.” Without ignoring or disparaging somewhat different task, for although many of the authors
the invocation of universals, which responds to a deep-
under consideration make explicit reference to the impor-
seated need that Wittgenstein ties to the “essence” of
tance of mediation—or religion as mediation, or the “intrin-
language and our “form of life,” such inquiry must me-
thodically, or at least strategically, start out from the sic” connection between religion and media, or the “nec-
singular, that is the particular: namely, words, things, essary” link between religion and media—they engage in
sounds, silences, smells, sensations, gestures, powers, much less unpacking of what this means in conceptual
affects, and effects. [p. 10] terms. If religion is, indeed, the concept that scholars are
trying to get beyond, “mediation,” it seems, is the one we
All the same, he goes on to elaborate, “the present empha- are still trying to get to.
sis on the singular over the universal may be only a coun- Some working definitions of mediation are given in
terpoint. In fact . . . the pendulum may already be swinging these volumes, perhaps most helpfully in a place that an-
back” (de Vries, pp. 10–11). thropologists would be least likely to look: Zito’s discussion
Throughout most of Religion: Beyond a Concept—and of “culture” in Morgan’s Key Words. How many anthropol-
certainly in the collection by Meyer and Moors—the focus ogists are yearning to read another piece on the culture
is still very much on the singular, with most thoughts on concept? Yet Zito serves us well by showing how a focus
deep-seated needs remaining latent. Yet, even so, as Meyer on mediation can help us make sense of and enrich the
suggests in her inaugural-lecture essay, these singularities practice-based critique of culture:

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If we take seriously the idea that culture is not a thing religions of the eyes, for this simplifies what are intricate in-
but a process—even though it may seem like a con- terrelations between the senses and even the importance
geries of things, and even though we can analyze only of synesthesia. The notion of “darshan,” or divine seeing-
through the materiality of things—we must get it in and-being-seen, for example, although of utmost impor-
analytic motion. Much in human life—including “the tance to what are recognized as Hindu traditions (Eck 1985),
social”—remains empirically directly unavailable. Yet
should not preclude recognizing how sound, as produced
we know it is “there”—in fact, a good deal of human life
in mantras, can play a crucial role in Hindu ritual practice.
is about making the invisible visible, that is, mediating
it. [in Morgan, p. 77] These characterizations also simplify the range of ways in
which a sense might function: Catholic and Protestant vi-
sual pieties can differ greatly, to say the least, and, as Leigh
Zito relates her position to Marx, although I think it is as Eric Schmidt (2000) has shown, there are parallel histories
important to recognize Hegel’s relevance (cf. Boyer 2007; of Christian investments in sound that complicate these la-
Eisenlohr 2009), in particular, his understanding of objecti- bels even more. All the same, at least theologically, sensual
fication. In a Hegelian sense, objectification is more of a de- hierarchies often discipline and direct the religious sub-
scriptive term than it became after Marx, when it acquired ject. Schulz herself is one of a number of scholars in re-
a more distinctively negative connotation (whether that is cent years to focus on the soundscapes of Islam, in which
because of Marx is another matter). As Daniel Miller has ar- practice is shaped by audition (see also, e.g., Eisenlohr 2009;
gued, objectification should not be understood as a dirty Hirschkind 2006). New media technologies (broadcasting;
word; it just “describes the inevitable process by which all recording) become ways of extending the soundscape be-
expression, conscious or unconscious, social or individual, yond its original spatiotemporal emplacement. Among the
takes specific form” (1987:81). Muslims with whom Schulz worked in Mali, this allowed
To talk about making the invisible visible as “mediat- one religious leader “to render his presence immediate and
ing the social” is but a subtle shift from “objectifying the heighten the spiritual aura of his voice” (in Morgan, p. 183).
social” by the light of Miller’s definition. And it is not co- That, in many ways, media technologies have been
incidental that Miller has parlayed his own work on mate- used to close the distance between the human and the
rial culture into the anthropology of media (e.g., Miller and divine (or the divine’s representatives) by playing on the
Slater 2000). It is, indeed, often those at an intersection be- senses that matter most in a sacred economy does not
tween material culture studies and media studies (and es- mean that such auratic extensions happen automatically.
pecially those attentive to the legacies of both Marx and Walter Benjamin’s classic “Work of Art” essay (1968; see also
Hegel) who have provided some of the most useful anthro- Benjamin 2008) has been a touchstone in this regard, being,
pological discussions of mediation to date (see, e.g., Boyer as it is, one of the most important reflections on mediation
2007; Eisenlohr 2009; Keane 2007; Mazzarella 2004; Meyer and how mass mediation affects the aura of the original.
2006; Pinney 2004). Although it makes many appearances throughout the vol-
Although the depth and breadth of the literature on umes under review, Benjamin’s essay is dealt with in most
mediation as a concept do not match those on religion, the depth by Dasgupta (in Meyer and Moors) in his analysis
productivity of this writing can be traced in the ethnograph- of “the aura in the public sphere.” For Benjamin, the aura
ically based studies in the collections under review. What in an original work of art (understood in traditional form
they make clear is that religious subjects are often quite as the product of religion and ritual) is indexed through
concerned with mediation: how it works, what it works its simultaneous proximity and distance: a presence that
through, who or what defines or controls its channels, what demands distanciation. Using Hindu nationalist discourse
it delivers, and so on. The two most dominant expressions as his main example, Dasgupta shows, in the spirit of
of this concern have to do with what one might call “rela- Benjamin’s original intentions, how an aura is not so much
tions to” and “relations of.” effaced as transformed by technological mediations; “its
“Relations to” have to do with how mediation positions character changes” (in Meyer and Moors, p. 256)—in this
people and their gods in relation to one another. They are case, according to Dasgupta, by infusing Hindu identity
concerns with distance and, often, presence (Engelke 2007; with a consumerist logic legitimated by globalization such
cf. Robbins n.d.). Calibrating the proper distance between that the aura “accrues in even the most profane practices
the human and the divine is often intimately bound up with and discourses” (p. 269).
the nature of a medium. In her Key Words entry on “sound- Questions of proximity and distance are also ques-
scape,” Schulz provides an overview of these calibrations in tions of control. As the ethnographic and historical records
relation to the mediations that often matter most in the re- indicate, the wider a text circulates, the more difficult it
ligious imagination: the human senses (Morgan’s own entry becomes for its producers or masters to determine its re-
on “image” is complementary). It is going too far to say that ception, despite the fantasy of control that often accompa-
Islam is a religion of the ear and Christianity and Hinduism nies technologies of expansion. This observation prompts

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consideration of the second dominant theme to emerge Conclusion: To end, and begin?
from religious studies’ media turn, the “relations of,” by
which I mean relations of power, of empowerment. Indeed, Reading these (and other works) on the media turn in re-
as within the wider field of media studies (see Boyer 2007), ligious studies, one is struck by the prevalence of two cri-
those on religion are often, at one level, about whether a tiques. The first, to which I have already alluded in passing,
particular medium is a path to freedom or enslavement. is a flat-out rejection of the version of post-Enlightenment
Will this thing—this icon, this image, this book, this tele- secular modernity in which religion is supposed to go pri-
phone, this computer—set me free or tie me down? Will it vate or even die. Again and again, media turners decry the
allow me to lead an authentic life (and in proper relation to poverty of this thesis. They do it so effectively, in fact, that,
the divine) or will it corrupt and cripple my ability to do so? when one reads through these volumes systematically, as a
These are the kinds of questions that relations of power and reviewer must, one begins to doubt that anyone could have
empowerment raise. been foolish enough ever to have believed that religion was
It is no contradiction to say that even the most fervent on the way out. This doubt is not eased by the fact that it is
supporters of a particular kind of mediation have doubts rare for critics of the post-Enlightenment metanarrative to
about and even a distrust of the chosen technology. As back up their claims with much detail. Rather, that narrative
Meyer shows in her chapter in Religion, Media, and the Pub- schema almost always serves as a rhetorical launching pad.
lic Sphere, Pentecostals in Ghana are, in this way, poten- This is not a criticism leveled specifically at contributors to
tial victims of their own success. They have managed to these volumes—or, at least, not only them. I have also been
harness video as a powerful channel for inculcating charis- guilty of using this metanarrative as a point of departure for
matic ways of seeing, in the process shaping the terms of thinking through things, for thinking about the “return” of
public life and popular entertainment. And yet, Meyer as- religion. Yet religion has not so much returned as returned
serts, “the spread of Pentecostalism into the public sphere to focus (see Derrida 2001:72, 78)—hardly the same thing.
has a cost: it distracts from the genuine religious experi- One task for those of us interested in the media turn and
ence” (in Meyer and Moors, p. 300). The flip side of this religious studies more generally is to ask exactly what good
embrace of a medium is, of course, its abolition or even it does to circulate this critique—quickly becoming some-
destruction—technophobia rather than technophilia. This thing of a metanarrative itself—without further elaboration
approach to mediums (and their materiality) is, of course, and reflection.
probably one of the best-studied sets of histories of religious The second critique raises a related but separate is-
traditions, the histories of iconoclasm. I am not sure if it is sue about the place of religion in media studies. In the
despite or because of this scrutiny, but iconoclasm is one overviews of media studies by those involved in religious
dynamic of religious mediation that receives comparatively studies, it is quite common to hear how key figures and
little attention across the volumes under review (although even schools—especially in the period from the 1970s to the
see Spyer in de Vries on iconography). 1990s—excluded religion from view. Thus, although Stuart
The dynamic between the mediate and immediate is Hall and others in the Birmingham School of cultural stud-
a defining feature of what scholars have come to call “reli- ies are often praised for bringing mass media to the fore as
gion” (see Mazzarella [2006] for a similar point relating to a legitimate interest, they are criticized for not linking mass
“politics”). Visible and invisible, immanent and transcen- media to religion (as they did with race, class, and gender).
dent, material and spiritual, natural and supernatural, mor- And Manuel Castells, despite his prescient work on the net-
tal and immortal, human and divine, here and not here, work society, is recognized as limiting his focus to funda-
known and unknown (knowable and unknowable), revealed mentalism. These criticisms are usually backed up with spe-
and concealed, present and absent—all of these extremely cific examples, unlike those leveled at post-Enlightenment
productive yet extremely problematic conceptions are the thought in general. Consequently they tend to hold more
inspirations for and products of religious mediations. To water. All the same, when they are viewed in relation to the
make sense—even to be debunked, made into nonsense— rich array of work in the volumes being considered, one
every one of these pairings is grappled with in and through question that arises is whether the media turn in religious
media. What the media turners have done is suggest that studies is meant only to fill a gap or whether the under-
the pairs are interesting not in themselves but for the standing of religion as mediation is supposed to reconfigure
conjunctions that join them. These conjunctions—these media studies per se. Is religion as mediation a supplement
ands—are not the recognition of binary oppositions but to- or a catalyst?
kens of a dialectic; these ands are the scrolls, icons, books, As it stands, I think, we do not know for sure. As
videos, radio broadcasts, and networks in cyberspace that Horsfield rightly notes in his Key Words entry on “media,”
define, substantiate, and challenge the relationships be- though, “with such a broad view of social mediation and re-
tween the visible and invisible worlds. ligion, its rich description can be so diffuse as to be of little

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strategic or policy value” (p. 114). Not to mention analytic. Eck, Diana
Another task for those of us committed to the media turn in 1985 Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg,
PA: Anima.
religious studies, then, is to ask how, if at all, religious medi-
Eisenlohr, Patrick
ations differ—how they compare to other “kinds” of media- 2009 Technologies of the Spirit: Devotional Islam, Sound Repro-
tions: political, economic, or otherwise. Is mediation itself a duction, and the Dialectics of Mediation and Immediacy in
stable and portable concept—an all-in-one tool in our kits? Mauritius. Anthropological Theory 9(3):273–296.
In the future, it will be important for media turners in reli- Engelke, Matthew
2007 A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African
gious studies to reflect further on mediation as a concept in
Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.
itself and to link their reflections in more depth to similar Habermas, Jürgen
ones in the human sciences. 2006 Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philoso-
In the end, I hope above all to have shown that it is phy 14(1):1–25.
precisely because the work in these volumes is so rich that Hirschkind, Charles
2006 The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic
we can venture to ask these questions, that we can set our-
Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.
selves some potential tasks. These books represent some- Keane, Webb
thing genuinely new that is afoot in the study of religion and 2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission En-
its beyond. counter. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2009 Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion. In
The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the
Production of Knowledge. Matthew Engelke, ed. Pp. 105–121.
Note Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lambek, Michael
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Dominic Boyer, Lara 2000 The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between
Deeb, Patrick Eisenlohr, and an anonymous reviewer for AE for Poetry and Philosophy. Current Anthropology 41(3):309–
their helpful comments on this essay. 320.
Latour, Bruno
1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter, trans.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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